Facebook’s Laughable Data Shows ‘LOL’ Isn’t Funny Anymore | Hacker News Reader

Facebook’s Laughable Data Shows ‘LOL’ Isn’t Funny Anymore

wsj.com

23 pointsmontrealer25 comments

Just anecdotally, many people I know never really used "LOL" unless we were being sarcastic. It always reminded me of the early/mid 90's when "The Internet!" started getting a lot of press and there were articles all over the place (in print, natch) about how to talk in "internet speak".

They'd list all of these abbreviations like "LOL" and "ROFL" among others that struck us, as likely dickish teenagers who considered ourselves savvy due to having used BBSes and IRS, like a signifier of "AOL-speak" used by the inexperienced noobs who learned about "The Internet!" from a magazine article.

Probably an unfair assessment and not really flattering considering we had only been using this stuff since the mid/late 1980s at best, but such is the folly of youth ;) Still, I never really lost that association of "LOL" with the annoyance I felt back at age 17 or 18 when "AOL kiddies" started showing up on IRC and MUDs.

I've found a significant number of older people think "LOL" is an abbreviation for "lots of love" or "lots of laughs" rather than "laughing out loud".

where does this come from? what's the origin of the "lots of love" meaning?

I think it was a prank for teaching people the wrong meaning. Besides this joke site is quite funny about it:

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Lol

It definitely pre-dates the internet - I remember my mother and grandmother writing it in birthday cards at least 25 years ago.

Also, I know someone named Lol - apparently it used to be quite a common shortening of Lawrence.

I've never used LOL. Most of all because it sounds sarcastic and I can think of better ways to sound sarcastic than using LOL. Since 20 years ago when I started communicating over the Internet I've been using the standard smiley, which is pretty old [1] and sometimes "haaaaahahahahahaha" to denote extreme laughter :-)

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/mbj/Smiley/Jok...

I never knew that people would consider ":-)" as laughing. For me it's just a smile, in the literal sense. And if I say something funny and you just smile I'd consider it a "that wasn't really funny, idiot" rather than a laugh. But good to know people think that way about that emoticon.

Well, in online conversations I don't really laugh as I don't find anything to be that funny. Actually judging by my online conversations on Facebook with those new emoticons, it seems to me that everybody online has lots of laughs, crawling over the floor, pissing themselves and I'm wondering what I'm missing, or what are those people smoking. But don't worry, as if I :-), that's not a pity laugh or sarcasm.

Nearly sounds sad, that you don't have much to laugh in online conversations. I sometimes nearly fall from the chair because I laugh so hard.

Maybe "new internet people" or "normal people" don't even know "lol" anymore. Back in the days we spend our youth in IRC or bbs where these abbreviations were common. But nowadays people connect with people they already know in real life on facebook and talk with them like they would in real life. (to a certain degree ;-) )

Maybe partially in interesting/cause is haha is easier to type then lol (at least on qwerty with 2 hands).

You know, this is probably a big part of it. On a touchscreen 'haha' and 'hehe' are way easier.

I'm confident that this is not why I say 'haha'. 'LOL' or 'lol' sounds sarcastic or at-best ironic to me. Certain people I know still use it at the end of sentences, but I (without meaning to) find it childish.

Years of watching The Simpsons wired my brain in a way that associates "haha" with sarcasm[0].

I use "hhhhh" instead, easy to type and makes a more "realistic" sound to me.

0.https://youtu.be/rX7wtNOkuHo

Depends on people's language I think. For me (German) "hhhh" sounds in my head like two dogs doing it, which might also be fun, but in a different way. But in fact there are many countries where they write "hhh" for laughing, so you're not alone.

The votes on this website says 20% use Lol. (which implies more older people read wsj)

My wife and her Thai friends frequently use "555" (the Thai word for "5" being "ha"). It's a nice cross-over between the two languages, and of course quite easy to type.

xaxaxa

jajaja

huehuehue

Internet games teach you a lot of things :)

kekekeke

funny, in Chinese 555 sounds like "who who who" which Chinese consider as a crying sound. Therefore they write 555 in sad situations.

At first I was surprised, but it's true. I saw a person writing "lol" a few days ago and it was really strange to read that nowadays. I thought that it is due to my increasing age, though. Didn't know the whole world stopped lolling.

Anecdata:

My local friends and I have always just used “heh”, but even 10–15 years ago, a bunch of my friends from Spanish-speaking cultures were using “j(a|e)+” or some approximate.

> ITT: People reminiscing about the old days or explaining how they, too, say haha.

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